MEGA commits $30 million to new products, starting with AI inference

The MegaETH Foundation, the team behind the Ethereum Layer 2 network MegaETH, has rebranded as MEGA and committed $30 million to new products, starting with an AI inference market planned for December.

The announcement comes after months of work in stealth mode, MEGA said Tuesday, adding that the team will now also develop new products alongside the MegaETH network.

All new products will run on MegaETH, MEGA said. Planned network upgrades, including fast finality, will also help support its AI inference product.

Inference is the process of running a trained AI model to produce an output. MEGA said providers charge different prices for similar services, but buyers may find it hard to know the risks of using cheaper providers they are not familiar with.

"There are still huge gaps between what providers charge for comparable inference," MegaETH co-founder Yilong Li said in a statement. "We think those gaps can be dramatically reduced."

MEGA calls its approach "Purified Intelligence," aiming to make inference from different providers more interchangeable, allowing more suppliers to compete in a global market.

Asked how the market would work and which providers or models would be available, MegaETH co-founder Shuyao Kong told The Block that MEGA had intentionally held back those details until the December launch.

"We believe crypto is the only technology that makes AI fair and open," she said, adding that developers will be the target customers for the inference market.

MEGA's $30 million commitment

The $30 million will come from MEGA's existing treasury to fund a range of products, Kong said, noting inference as the project's "largest move."

MEGA said its mandate includes expanding the uses of the MEGA token. When asked what role the token would have in the inference market, Kong said: "This is our mandate, so wherever there are ways to utilize the MEGA token, we will."

The MegaETH team has raised more than $80 million to date across venture funding, community rounds and token sales. That includes a $20 million seed round announced in June 2024, led by Dragonfly with backing from Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin and others; a $10 million Echo round in December 2024; about $13 million from its Fluffle NFT sale in February 2025; and about $40 million from its public token sale in October 2025, according to Kong. She said the public sale amount reflects discounts for buyers who agreed to lock their tokens for one year.

Kong also noted that MegaETH bought back some investors' stakes last year. As The Block previously reported, the team repurchased a 4.75% stake comprising equity and token warrants from pre-seed investors in summer 2025.

The MegaETH network launched its public mainnet earlier this year and currently has about $12 million in total value locked, down from its peak of over $245 million, according to DefiLlama data.

The MEGA token went live in April this year and is currently trading at around $0.05, down over 76% from its all-time high, according to The Block's MEGA price page.